Manufacturers of off-highway vehicles are faced with the same challenges as companies in other sectors reducing design and manufacturing costs, reducing lead times, and improving product quality. Today, many of these companies create their electrical and wire harness designs using basic drawing packages. This paper describes how off-highway vehicle manufacturers can gain significant productivity and quality improvements in their electrical design process by using dedicated electrical design software tools.

This paper addresses the issue of increasing complexity of today's automotive and aerospace electrical systems. Manufacturers now seek a high degree of integration between their business and design tools.  MCAD, ECAD, PLM, PDM, Workflow and ERP systems are no longer selected purely through their individual functionalities, they must also integrate - and the integration must include all data in the process

Aircraft Electrical Wiring Interconnect Systems (EWIS) regulatory requirements are stringent and can be expensive to fulfill. Specifications encompass harness naming conventions, physical wire spacing, and much more. While manual design approaches have long sufficed, increasing complexity is driving an industry-wide move to automated design solutions. By applying rules and constraints, commercial off-the-shelf tools can help designers manage complex system designs while simultaneously building databases for compliance, manufacturing, and maintenance documentation.

In this paper, the problem of wiring complexity that confronts electronic and electrical (EE) design engineers in the automotive, trucks and off-road industries will be discussed. The forces driving growing complexity in designs will be identified, including the pace of technological advancement, increasing legislative safety and environmental mandates, and escalating consumer demand. The consequences of escalating complexity for automotive EE designs and total manufacturer product cost will be analyzed. Areas needing improvement in current practices will be suggested and a suite of tools focused on the design-to-build-and-service flow will be described. Transportation platforms such as automobiles, trucks and off-road vehicles have contained electrical systems for decades. However, the last few years have seen a discontinuity in the nature of these electrical systems. Rapid growth in on-board electronic content and embedded software is putting huge demands on electrical design complexity. Put simply, the number of signals flowing around each vehicle is rising rapidly. Naturally this has a profound effect on harness design and construction.

The aerospace industry has long been perceived as slow to adapt to new wire harness engineering technologies and processes. Many enterprises rely on systems created in-house, with each tool being structured to support a very specific design/build process. Departments and divisions responsible for defining the electrical content of vehicles and integrating the electrical systems have one of the most demanding jobs in vehicle design.  While these organizations are often understaffed relative to the scope of their task, they have the distinction of being expected to manage the highest number and rate of design changes. Companies, especially OEMs, are finding it difficult to adopt new wire harness technologies and processes while maintaining the quality of their deliverables. Until recently, electrical system and wire harness development tools have not been viewed as an adequate solution for developing complex electrical wiring systems. Now aircraft systems and wiring designs are making a transition from traditional mechanical and pneumatic systems to electrical, and the entire electrical architecture of the vehicle is becoming more complex. Companies are finding that their existing solutions do not provide the needed engineering capability. But powerful new technologies are emerging and many companies are taking another look.  Entrenched beliefs are changing.